After a four day break from illness, the monk must return.  Hopefully he is recharged, in energy, vision and in habit.  The apartment is cleaner than it has been.  One could see how with the visit from chef Gordon Vercingetorix and his late night courts at the Old Gaul, the barman in the crosshairs would be a bit worn, the effect cumulative.  But each is responsible for his own habits.

The quiet of the days off, much of it with no more energy than to lay about and meditate, the return hopes for more tidiness and better cleaner habit, to not be fired up by what happens at the bar, to not get worked up, nervous, poked, prodded, all those things that aren't good for you.


My father probably sensed in me that in his son he had a kind of old man, an old soul, who'd come to him for the reasons of the deep reality.  One on his way to being a kind of monk.

But I admit the usual nerves heading back.  I'd left my bike, Dennis the late night denizen gave me a ride back to the apartment.   Walking, the sunlight, the woods, would be a good way to ease back into it.

But if all you are doing is describing the world as it is, you are not accomplishing very much.  This is the sort of benign deficiency of some forms of journalistic reporting.  Necessary, perhaps, but  in a way ultimately distracting, unnerving.  Not a matter helpful to personal health, mental health.  The concerns of the worldly are overwhelming, and in a way similar to to the processes that make familiarity breed contempt.   This is the distinction between journalism and literature, along certain subjective lines of thought, perhaps, not that there is any clear line of separation.  Otherwise, how could we account for our own personal unhappiness with material things, despite our best efforts to do that which they call work.

The situations we find ourselves in come as the situations which represent our own personal unsolvable Zen koan to solve...